Offshore. The abandoned oil rig. The deepest level of the undersea bunker.
Cold seawater surged in dark currents beyond the thick tempered glass.
A muffled directional blast tore the titanium-alloy airlock leading to the bottom-level core area into chunks of scrap metal.
Chris pushed through first with his tungsten-steel rifle up. Piers was right behind him.
Their movements were fluid. The last squad of elite J'avo stationed here didn't even get their guns raised before precise rounds shattered their skulls.
"Clear." Piers swept the room, moved quickly to a life-support pod in the corner, wrenched the hatch open, and pulled out the senior United Nations official inside, still wearing a breathing mask. "Target confirmed. Vitals stable."
"Get him geared up. We're pulling out." Chris kept his guard up, scanning the unusually vast and empty chamber as he gave the order.
But the instant they moved to extract with the hostage, the entire undersea bunker erupted in violent tremors.
Shrieking alarms blared through the chamber. A synthesized female countdown voice echoed off the walls:
"Warning. HAOS has awakened... Warning..."
Seawater flooded in. A skeletal colossus, so enormous it was suffocating to look at, slowly squeezed up from the abyss below.
Its entire body was semi-translucent and gelatinous, with high-concentration C-Virus source fluid coursing through its interior. The massive skull-face had no eyes, only a horrifying maw and countless thick, semi-translucent tentacles.
The thing ground and cracked its way upward, smashing through the floor structure as it emerged.
"This is Carla's final trump card?" Piers sucked in a sharp breath at the sight of the creature towering dozens of meters above them.
If this thing reached the surface, the C-Virus aerosol radiating from its body would be enough to trigger a global-scale bioextinction event.
"Doesn't matter how big it gets. It's just a pile of half-formed rotten meat. It dies here today!"
A cold glint flashed in Chris's eyes. His tungsten-steel rifle switched to full auto. Rounds poured into the massive body of HAOS like a downpour.
Every armor-piercing round punched a fist-sized hole in its semi-translucent flesh.
But the creature was too large. The rate of destruction couldn't come close to matching its rate of recovery.
HAOS was fully enraged by these two ants. It let out a deafening roar, and its massive tentacles swept toward the three of them like deep-sea serpents, instantly snapping every support column in their path clean in half.
The metal floor beneath Chris's feet buckled upward, then shattered apart like a cracker.
"Get the hostage behind cover!"
Chris charged forward instead of retreating, launched off the buckling floor, and rushed head-on at the thick tentacle bearing down on him.
He drew the high-frequency vibration blade and, at the moment of contact, used sheer force and high-voltage arcs to split the tentacle in two down the middle.
HAOS shrieked in agony.
Piers shielded the UN official and fell back to the perimeter, bracing his sniper rifle and feeding rounds into the creature's regeneration core nodes.
The two of them worked in perfect sync.
"That's it, Captain..." The words died in his throat.
Fed by the seawater flooding in, HAOS's shattered limbs were reassembling and regenerating at a visible rate.
A tentacle hidden beneath the murky water burst upward and smashed into the metal cover in front of them.
The impact sent Piers and his rifle flying. He crashed hard into a far corner.
"Piers, you alright?"
Chris bit down and rolled clear of the follow-up tentacle strike, but his tungsten-steel rifle slipped from his grip during the tumble. He dropped into chest-deep seawater. The icy salt water hit the wound on his left arm and the pain sent veins bulging across his forehead.
HAOS lowered its head. Two points of pale blue light flickered to life in its hollow eye sockets. Its gaping maw opened slowly, descending toward Chris.
Chris reached behind his back and drew the high-frequency vibration blade again. Gripped it tight.
At least he'd get one more cut in before he went down.
A sniper rifle cracked.
Piers had braced the rifle one-handed and risen from the corner. His left arm hung limp, shoulder dislocated.
He emptied every round in the magazine into HAOS's open mouth.
The barrage broke HAOS's focus. It let out a furious shriek, and multiple tentacles hammered down at Piers simultaneously.
"Come on! I'm right here!"
Piers shouted, drawing fire, buying Chris time to breathe. He rolled clear of the first tentacle but caught the shockwave of the second across his side. His whole body flew sideways and slammed into a tilted support column.
The sound of ribs breaking.
Chris surged out of the water, grabbed the back of Piers's tactical vest, and dragged him to a relatively safe corner.
Both of them were completely out of ammo. The water had risen past their chests.
HAOS was regenerating faster and faster. The shattered tentacles were now regrowing almost the instant they were severed. The entire creature was even larger than when the fight had started.
"Captain." Piers leaned against the wall, blood at the corner of his mouth, his voice strangely calm. "I'll cover you. Take the hostage and go."
"Shut up."
"Its regeneration core is in the chest cavity. My sniper rifle's armor-piercing rounds can't punch through. But if there's enough explosive yield detonated from the inside..." Piers pulled a syringe from his tactical vest. High-concentration C-Virus source fluid. "I can use this."
Chris's pupils contracted hard. "Don't you dare."
"One guy turning into a monster beats all three of us dying down here."
Piers bit the protective cap off the syringe. The needle hovered over his own carotid artery.
His thumb was about to press the plunger.
A massive detonation shook the world.
The ultra-thick alloy dome overhead, rated to withstand thousands of meters of deep-sea pressure, collapsed inward without warning.
A hole over a meter wide was punched through by some terrifying external force.
Seawater cascaded in like a waterfall, and a black figure plummeted straight down, slamming into the metal wreckage between Chris and HAOS.
The impact cratered the steel plate deep beneath his feet.
Chris and Piers stared.
"Ry... Ryan?!" Chris looked in shock at the man slowly rising to his feet.
[This novel is now COMPLETE. Read the entire series right now on Patreon: patreon.com/NiaXD]